Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [92]
Almost double the 25 million who bought a PSP (many in Japan, where it remains very popular) went for a DS, which (stop me if you’ve heard this before) wasn’t as technically powerful or robust but had a longer battery life and offered more distinctive gaming choices. In response to the PSP, Nintendo released the redesigned DS Lite, and sales almost doubled again. PSP countered with its own redesigns, the thinner PSP Slim & Lite and then the PSP Go, which hid its controls the way texting phones hide their keyboards. Nintendo countered with the DSi, which has a pair of cameras, then the supersized DSX. The PSP remains a legitimate gaming system that makes Sony a lot of money every year. But it’s living the life of Napoleon in Elba, a conquered conqueror waiting for the next chance to strike.
22 – MARIO’S PRINCESS
THE WII
Video games get compared to movies quite often. Certainly game makers themselves have helped bolster this parallel.
They bill themselves as directors and producers, hire actors as voice talent, feature long full-motion video sequences, and frame their shots for maximum cinematic impact. But maybe films aren’t the best metaphor. They’re both audiovisual experiences, yes, but films are passive. Games aren’t. Gamers’ imagination and resources determine what happens, and how much enjoyment they get out of it.
Perhaps the better media comparison is with books. Think of a big-box bookstore, two stories high with titles of every stripe. Most every video game ever made would go into one of a paltry few stacks: science fiction, fantasy, young adult. Indeed, these are where the novelizations of many of these games, the Mario novels included, are found. But the majority of the sections would be almost barren of video games. Business and finance? Cookbooks? Reference? Biographies? Address books? Calendars? Whatever people enjoy doing, shouldn’t there be an audience who wants to do that in a game? Most games were escapist adventures: but not everyone wants or needs to escape from his or her life.
Video games were a specific stripe of genre fiction, in other words. Even the puzzle games were given a story: players couldn’t just play a tile-matching game, they had to pretend to be feuding pirates who fight via pseudo Tetris. Putting the yoke of such a story on an experience was limiting. Adding insult to injury, often it was a terrible story, with derivative plots, wooden characters, and rank dialogue. All those empty shelves represented a massive untapped market.
NINTENDO’S GAMECUBE SUCCESSOR, WITH THE WORKING name of Revolution, promised to be exactly that: a revolution. It would have to be, going up against both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Its biggest weapon was a man, with the initials SM, who was the worldwide symbol of excellence in games. And he was not an Italian plumber. Whatever the new system would be, credit would go to Shigeru Miyamoto, who on March 13, 2006, was honored as a knight of arts and literature by the French minister of culture. His appointment book was now peppered with lifetime achievement awards receptions.
The PS3, out in 2006, was going to be the most powerful game system yet, and came standard with a Blu-ray player. (Which helped eliminate its rival HD-DVD: both systems cost hundreds of dollars, but only one shipped with a free video game system.) The Xbox 360, which would be first to market in November 2005, was outputting frame rates and picture quality so precise that only flat-screen televisions were sophisticated enough to show its details. Microsoft and Sony had thrown themselves into the megahertz measuring contest with full force.